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BitCoin Advertising Networks

Recently, when I went into my blog's analytics I discovered that my articles about BitCoin are in high-demand. So I asked myself why don't publish ads and get paid in BitCoin for them, instead of good ol' Google AdSense. Follow me into the bleeding-edge realm of BitCoin Advertising Networks.

Candidates

First of all you should know that I had the privilege of working at Yahoo!, and therefore use sometimes language of the ad business, but I will try to explain everything in layman's terms.

One thing should be obvious, you can't expect Rightmedia, AdSense or AdBrite functionality from a BitCoin-scene related digital ad network. Or can you?

Without giving results of my findings away, I found that if you are familiar with BitCoin related enterprises like BitFunder, you will be able to familiarise yourself with the bitcoin advertising networks pretty easily.

In this review I will compare three different BitCoin advertising networks, there are as a matter of fact many more out there. If you know any that are great please post them in the comments section (still waiting for the ghost team to develop comments).

In the following I will be reviewing the following BitCoin Advertisment Networks:

Review

Anonymous Ads

The publisher front end was well made and displayed quite some bits of useful information like PVs, clicks and revenue.

Setup with Anonymous Ads was a breeze since there is no login required. Really quick and easy, you can go straight to creating an ad creative for your site. The publisher front end was well made and displayed quite some bits of useful information like PVs, clicks and revenue.

You can also customise the colors for your text-only ads. After one hour of usage Anonymous Ads started to display ads on my web site. Four unique impressions (PVs) later, my balance showed a disillusioning amount of 0.00000006 Ƀ.

Way too many zeros for my taste, but time showed that this network calculates revenue similar to the way Google's AdSense does - Anonymous Ads pays for pure impressions too.

After 24 hours and 100 impressions, the revenue of my ad unit rose to 0.00007 Ƀ.

Operation Fabulous

Setup was rather annoying, since you could not immediately log-in, but had to request a password reset. No big issue, but I wanted to mention it.

The banner was displaying a placeholder, the same problem as with Anonymous Ads. Time will tell how fast they activate the account.

The user front end was rather untidy, but yet had a huge section to ban or allow content, like adult or gambling.

This section was considerably more detailed than with Anonymous Ads, yet horribly designed from a UX perspective. After 24 hours of testing this BitCoin advertising network did not display any ads.

Coin URL

Next up was CoinURL. After I signed up, I immediately new that this one stood out from the crowd. Beautiful UI in the Web front end, a lot of functions and easy setup and navigation. To make this even better, ads started immediately to display on my pages. Quickly revenue showed 0.00004100 BTC after only 2 clicks. That's a great start!

Beautiful UI in the Web front end, a lot of functions and easy setup and navigation.

Content filter options were good, even better and easier to understand than with Op Fabulous.

There is also the option to create interstitial ads, technology following Adfly's concept, where a site is taken over and the visitor is forced to view the ad, and you get paid by the impression. You can see it in action via this pre-shorted link to a BitCoin/Linux tutorial of mine.

Revenue Sharing is also possible, which is great in case you have different authors on your Web site and want to share the coinage with them. An advanced feature that I also know from Google. Overall I think the screen shots speak for themselves. After 24 hours of testing this BitCoins advertising network worked still fine as expected.

Conclusion

Overall I can say I am satisfied with the ease of setup of at least 2 vendors. Functionalities and front end differ hugely. All three vendors did not manage to match the content of the creative to the content of my blog post. Or at least not at the time of writing or I am just too stupid to see it, but I saw only BitCoin Ads.

CoinURL is the clear winner of this review, they have the nicest options and highest revenue. Well done!

Anonymous Ads is coming in second. I did not like that you cannot delete your creative, this is a security concern imho, as everyone can see your stats and domain name.

Operation Fabulous, although I like their name, comes in last. After 24 hours there were still no ads displayed with Op Fabulous.

You might have noticed that I did not touch the topic of revenue in depth. As soon as revenue flows in, I will come back and upgrade this review about BitCoin Advertising accordingly. Time will tell if the technology of content matching is even in the realm of the doable for these BitCoin start-up companies. Having said that, CoinURL earns the "Satoshi Ad Award 2013" from this blog.

In case you decide to sign-up at Coin URL or Anonymous Ads, please use one of my links as a sign of your appreciation for this review. You might also be interested in reading my review about BitCoin Mining pools.